Commissioned by the Moon

A pen date with the Lunar Principal

This week, we moved into our potato chip storage unit. Many of you know we’ve been roughing it in a 10x20 shed tiny house for the last 4 months. Pilgrimaging to the privy. Boiling water to do the dishes. All in, for our little family, it was mostly cozy and memorable, but we are very glad to have shifted our energy across the yard to our new home.

Here is a picture:

Now that we’re moved in, we have cleaned out the tiny house, and are turning it into my recording studio. And with this conversion, we are preparing for spring, to add to the wild orchard growing around it already. The folk opera Cianalas/Tãsknota will be released, surrounded by pollinators, and berries and fruit, and harvest.

Wild Orchard Studios.

With that said, I wanted to let you in on a commissioning I received two nights ago in our little sauna, (where nearly all songs from Cianalas/Tãsknota arrived).

For the past 2 years I have been in discernment about whether or not I will write a book - a “glorified liner note”- to accompany this album, but the answer to whether or not I will work with that medium, has kept eluding me.

It is still eluding me in some sense, but two nights ago, under the light of the waxing moon, I was commissioned, (and this will sound crazy), by the Lunar Principal - that primordial feminine force - to write whatever it is I am to write, only when immersed in water, or by the light of the moon.

Although the first single of Cianalas/Tãsknota arrives on May 5th, the full album will not be released until All Hallows. So I am preparing to pilgrimage with pen and paper, to the sauna whenever the moon shines her silver light through those windows, and whenever I take a bath. Already, the scrawling by moonlight has unearthed so much more of my humanity.

This week, the legendary Margaret Starbird shared my song Human One with her readers. And it was interesting timing, because I had just finished reading her book Mary Magdalene’s Lost Legacy - Symbolic Numbers and Sacred Union in Christianity. Her chapter on the book of Revelations, slaked a thirst that has ever haunted me as I wander the wasteland we’ve made of things, searching for the salmon wisdom that goes against the flow, not to rebel, but always in the name of regeneration. In this chapter she suggests that when John the Revelator, as someone from the Jewish/low Christology school, keeps saying “Worship God! - the mark is the number of a man and that number is 666.” He is in some sense, offering a dire warning to those who would focus the full and complete energy of the uncreated One, into the masculine solar principal, (whose number happens to be 666).

My animistic sensibilities have always loved John’s gospel the most. The high Christology that really marks the age of conscious incarnation. And that’s always going to be part of me. But as I dance with this idea of a hyper-focused energy into the solar principal, it makes so much sense as to why we’re being baked, like an eternal flash of photography… a too much light… desertifying the land.

The repressed and spurned lunar principal churns up an irrational flash flood, like a lever as long as the distance to the moon, hoisting the oceans into tsunamic proportions.

Desert and flash flood does not beauty make.

And an intuition worth sacrificing for, is that this is a ternary world of immeasurable beauty.

So it would seem I have been commissioned to write by the light of the moon, to do my part to invoke and activate the holy wells across this planet… that a slaking and blooming of this wasteland would come up from a very mysterious place. Namely the cracks between sparring rigidities on the surface of things.

This theme already weaves throughout my new album, so it makes complete “sense” to me that I would be reading this book, that Margaret Starbird would share my song Human One this week, and that the moon took it upon herself to ask of me a further deepening of my burgeoning crow’s feet.

In the meantime, I thought I would share this picture with you, and a bit of moon writing that I offered on social media this week (to bloom the desert there):

Photo: connecting with a family home parish in Kashubian lands, Poland.

Sometimes it’s simply hard to believe that my grandparent’s parents knew languages that still swim in some musical region in me, that needs no translation.

Part of my body is still drifting past the crucifix crossroads in my Kashubian homelands.

Some remnant of my retinas are still looking out at cerulean skies, feet in the mottled turquoise sea where my highland grandmother fell for my seafaring grandfather.

A deep cellular part of me is still in the storm that churned up a loss so great, that the whales threw their sonorous themes across the big water “come back! This generation will miss you, but in time you’ll be ‘come from away!’” The seals too, barked their cries, “you’ll be seen as a tumour on the landscape, your honking big Rv clogging up the narrow way, leaving behind an insidious trail of unwept grief.” But you had been cleared off, and your bellies were empty, and you were gone.

Tãsknota was the word. Homesick. Longing.

Cianalas was the word. Homesick. Aching.

And the loss was cloaked with gain. A bit of beautiful bush, a sack of flour, and a sow. We need you to settle they said. And the gain turned into outsourced loss… more and more clearances… and to this day, it keeps on funnelling up, up, up into the sweaty palms of comfort.

To be from a place? I kneel at this mysterious escarpment, now four generations in, and ask with grief-filled humility, to feel a sense of home here. I put my feet on the ground like an unsure lover reaches out her arms.

I’ve heard the beautiful powerful grandmother voices that have long been in these lands. And I’ve heard the beautiful powerful grandmother voices in my lost lands.

We flew back from our lost homelands on the eve of All Hallows, Samhain, the thin time, and I know some great mediation and connection reached across with us, a spiritual cord, that may even outlast the telephone cables.

Honey, I’m home.